Birthday Fundraiser ending soon!

Wrapping up my birthday month fundraiser for UNRWA. I’ve been supporting UNRWA since the US pulled funding, based on lies, disinformation, and propaganda. Hurting UNRWA hurts the displaced Palestinians it was created to help, which is precisely why the Israeli Government and the US politicians who have wholey and enthusiastically supported the genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, are determined to destroy it. I have not made a single political donation to a candidate since 2023 unless they were against the genocide, and I’m dedicating those funds and more to UNRWA.

Republican’s greatest accomplishment of the last 50 years was not Bush v. Gore, Trump’s election or re-election, nor packing the Supreme Court. It was convincing voters that government couldn’t do things. A big part of the success of that story gaining traction is that Democrats still haven’t figured out how to avoid joining them in making that point. Democrats constantly defend systems and institutions that are inherently racist, designed to be broken from the start, and which can’t possibly produce good results.

It’s not a stacked deck, or an uphill climb. It’s Democrats refusing to quit playing three-card monte even thought the wallet inspector has already taking all their cash. Democrats are incapable of expressing a vision where government does things, and the fact that doing things for people just like you and I means we need to raise taxes to fund that effort. In fact Democratic Presidential hopefuls like Cory Booker, are proposing cutting taxes via across the board floors that are stupid, hurt our ability to fund things, and benefit billionaires as much as they help people waiting in line at the food pantry. But taxes also provide a form of public buy in. The fact that everyone pays taxes (scaled to their ability to pay, when we don’t give tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires) are part of the foundation of a representative democracy.

One symptom of this problem is visible in NJ, where Chris Christie capped property tax increases at 2% in 2010, a major coup for a Republican Governor in a blue state and long before he left office with a sub-20% approval rating. Yet it’s 2026, multiple school districts are talking about catastrophic cuts to teaching staff, paraprofessionals, arts, and sports, and we still are constrained by a 2% cap. When inflation is higher than 2%, and existing costs skyrocket with double digit increases year over year, how can you continue to offer quality services while having your budget shrink year after year?

Healthcare costs alone are regularly rising over 10% per year, and employee costs are 60+ percent of most district and government budgets. But Democrats in NJ have been unable to communicate what taxes pay for and what benefits every resident gets from the taxes that we pay. So we’re still handcuffed by a 15 year old law that was the crown jewel policy of a deeply unpopular former Governor. Districts can raise extra over the 2% cap specifically for healthcare expenses, but the law signed by Christie still caps those extra raises far below than the actual increases in healthcare costs we have experienced for the last several years.

The theory of the cap was that if districts and municipalities didn’t have the ability to raise more and more money year over year then the contracts and other expenses would see their rise slowed out of market forces or some such bullshit. This might be true if not for another Democratic failing, privatization.

Municipalities and schools, eager to shed salaried (and unionized) employees in a world of skyrocketing healthcare and retirement costs, outsource everything they can to for-profit companies. This creates a short term savings, something irresistible to politicians and school board members eager to tout a 0% tax increase. But it introduces a nefarious factor that should never be factored into public services like education, healthcare, housing, and government: profit.

Maybe the first few years after privatizing has some savings on paper, especially if you don’t include the lost spending power of public employees now working for for profit companies. These public employees often live in our communities, and if not, almost always live in state. If we’re “saving taxpayer money” and they’re still providing the same services, definitionally that means the employees are financially worse off. Add in the fact that the for-profit companies want to, you know, profit, and those profits can only come from one place, further reductions to the employees wages and benefits.

So we’re taking public funds, and instead of directing them to the teachers, janitors, clerks, bus drivers, trash collectors, paraprofessionals, or nurses, we let a for-profit company skim profit off the top and then pay all those people less for the same work. Most of the time they also lose union protections, so they can be fired if they speak up or try to organize, or if they react badly to their new manager’s sexual advances, or object to the unethical practices their new corporate bosses try to enact.

But we’re saving money! In some definition of “we” at least. But then in the next contract round, prices suddenly spike, and mysteriously they spike across all bidders at once. But we can’t go without a contract for garbage collection, or snow plowing, or paraprofessionals, or bus drivers, so we’re trapped. We sign the higher cost contract, and (shockingly) we’re no longer saving money. But the employees of the for-profit companies, don’t see that extra money, because the increase in contract costs was never about paying them better, it was about greed. Either direct greed by their employer, or greed at the health insurance carrier, or greet at the supply company, or greed at the oil company causing gas prices to rise.

When costs go up we lay off public employees, and sign contracts instead. But what do you do when those contract costs go up? You have no flexibility or agility left, because you have already cut your workforce to the bone. In a district that has bus drivers, paraprofessionals, and teachers who you aren’t overworking and burning out, there’s folks who can take extra shifts, sponsor a club, coach a team. But once you’re outsourced and cut there’s no elasticity left. So you have to eat the higher contract costs, and offset the increase by firing more in-house staff. It’s a death spiral. And with a 2% cap, you can’t ever get ahead. This is the degradation of government services, Chris Christie, Millionaire, wanted.

This is the world Republicans want. Government seen as failing, paying more and more money to corporations, workers getting squeezed. But it’s not just Republicans. Senate President Steve Sweeney was all too happy to give Christie his tax cap. In years since, including when he was still Senate President and Democrats had a trifecta, holding Assembly and Senate majorities and the Governor’s Office, they didn’t fix what Sweeney and Christie broke.

Now our teachers, paraprofessionals, public works employees, fire fighters, and students are paying the price.

Reading

Trump’s Omnishambles Deepens With Dire Strait News by Martin Pengelly

According to the Post, the Pentagon on Tuesday told Congress that clearing the Strait of Hormuz of Iranian mines could take six months – and efforts to do so cannot start until the war is over.

The Strait is a key waterway for trade, particularly in oil, fertilizer, and other commodities. The Post is one of the mainstream outlets Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has tried to stop reporting on the Pentagon. Hasn’t worked. Citing three sources, the paper said the timeline for clearing the Strait was “met with frustration by Democrats and Republicans alike,” as “perhaps the clearest sign that gasoline and oil prices could remain elevated long after any peace deal is reached.”

Impervious to reality as ever, Trump insists Tehran will soon “cry uncle.” But yesterday, as Iran attacked two cargo vessels in the Strait, a Nephew had ominous words for the White House.

Though mines in the Strait might not cause a “total interruption” of shipping traffic, said Richard Nephew, an Iran expert at Columbia University, “You’re not going to have many people wanting to run that risk” and send ships into death-strewn waters.

Furthermore, even if peace can be found and a six-month effort to clear the Strait then starts, it seems Iran won’t be much help, given it has reportedly indicated it doesn’t know where all its mines are.

Behind every such headline lingers a dread fact for Trump: the midterm elections are just six months away. And every day, in every way, the administration is lurching further into the feared world of the “omnishambles.”

https://zeteo.com/p/trumps-omnishambles-deepens-with

Listening to testimonies from Gaza to Perugia by Dana Mills

Gaza was at the center of many discussions, alongside urgent questions about the situation in the West Bank, where ethnic cleansing is taking hold with unprecedented speed and magnitude. Moving between panels, I felt proud to be part of +972 Magazine and deeply troubled by what my country, Israel, is doing.

In one panel, Wael al-Dahdouh, bureau chief of Al Jazeera in Gaza City, spoke about finding his six-month-old grandson among the rubble. He described the feeling that he had betrayed his wife by surviving the Israeli airstrike that killed her.

It was all so awful, and yet strangely familiar. Listening to people recount their stories of enduring the genocide, I found myself on the side of the perpetrators, rather than the eternal victim Israelis are taught to see themselves as from an early age.

After Hamas’ attacks on southern Israel on October 7, the Israeli state and mainstream media did what they do so well with the memory of the Holocaust: weaponizing testimonies of trauma to rally and consolidate public sentiment. Meanwhile, the stories of the genocide taking hold in Gaza were largely absent from Israeli discourse.

https://www.972mag.com/wp-content/themes/rgb/newsletter.php?page_id=8&section_id=191796

Do I belong in tech anymore? by Ky Decker

I’m genuinely torn over whether I could do more good by pushing to be able to answer Ky’s question as “Yes” or to say, “No, you shouldn’t keep doing damage to yourself, no matter how much I could try to help you.”

I keep asking myself:

What happened to the principles that were professed a decade ago? To address climate change? To reduce racial, gender, and economic inequality? To “don’t be evil”?

Were these principles abandoned, or were they merely born of convenience?

Has tech always been like this? Was I just blind to it before?

When I say that I am burnt out I do not mean simply that I am tired. I’m referring to the “emotional experience of political defeat”:

Burnout in Freudenberger’s articles from this period is not just defined in terms of physical tiredness as a result of doing too many things; rather, it emerges from emotional investment in a cause and from the disappointments that arise when flaws in a political project become apparent. Freudenberger’s concept not only describes physical exhaustion but also acknowledges the need to deal with anger caused by grief brought about by the “loss of an ideal.” Burnout in the context of social justice projects thus often involves a process of mourning, according to Freudenberger. Returning to his earlier writings on burnout makes it clear that when understood as a malaise arising from politically committed activities, burnout cannot be equated with tiredness or stress.

Hannah Proctor, Burnout, p. 92

I love designing and building things for the web, but I’m mourning an industry that does not share the ideals I once thought it did.

Do I belong in tech anymore? · Ky Decker

On quitting, the spread of AI, and the loss of an ideal.

Police Are Using AI Camera Networks to Stalk Women by Joe Wilkins

Today, Flock operates in over 6,000 cities across the US, with over 76,000 license plate readers and counting. Given the proliferation of license plate readers and the power dynamics at play — police watch out for one another, after all — it’s not hard to imagine the number of active ALRP abuse cases are actually much higher.

“The fundamental problem with these systems is that they place private information about people’s movements over time in the hands of every officer,” said Michael Soyfer, an Institute for Justice attorney whose work involves challenging ALPR expansions. “Without the constitutional safeguard of a warrant requirement, that predictably allows officers to abuse their access to these systems for things like stalking romantic partners.”

Police Are Using AI Camera Networks to Stalk Women

There have been 14 documented incidents where police officers used automatic license plate readers to stalk romantic interests.

Speaker Johnson's beginning of the end by Noah Berlatsky

Immigration used to be one of Trump’s strengths, but polls show that most voters now disapprove of his handling of the issue. Tellingly, immigration is one of the matters most cited by 2024 Trump voters who today disapprove of his performance, according to analyst G. Elliott Morris.

Swing district Republicans, then, have strong incentives to turn against Trump on immigration. It’s not a coincidence either that multiple representatives from Ohio and Florida voted with Pressley — those are both states with large Haitian communities. The vote, in other words, was inspired by members turning against the bigoted agenda of the president and his House lickspiddle.

That’s the kind of coalition which could well hold on other votes. And it provides a blueprint for a better immigration politics — one that could create a bipartisan consensus to fight for humane policies, breaking free of 20 years of escalating cruelty to assuage the right.

https://www.publicnotice.co/p/mike-johnson-loses-republicans

Does J Street Exist? by Van Jackson

This context of a dramatic sea change in US politics is important for situating the sturm und drang that erupted when J Street announced last week that it supported longstanding popular demands to end US financial support for Israel’s military. The timing of the announcement came only weeks after AOC had stated publicly that she opposed funding for the Israeli military, including for Iron Dome. Democrats have similarly begun recalibrating their stance on Israel. Even the Dems’ leading hawk, Elissa Slotkin, now opposes certain forms of arms transfers to Israel, though she still supports “defensive” weapons sales and subsidies.

But all is not as it seems.

Policy wonks and activists alike need to understand how the terrain has and has not shifted. Nobody in the Zionist camp has called for an end to the Pentagon policy of QME (qualitative military edge) through which the US commits to ensuring Israeli military primacy in the Middle East even as the US also sells advanced weapons to Israel’s Gulf neighbors.

https://www.un-diplomatic.com/p/does-j-street-exist

The media blackout of Jared Kushner’s historic, ongoing corruption scandal by Judd Legum

Among the publications analyzed, The New York Times has had the most substantive coverage of Kushner’s conflict. Still, the vast majority of the New York Times coverage of Kushner’s diplomatic role does not even briefly mention his financial conflict.

Notably, some publications that have completely ignored Kushner’s conflict produced the reporting that established the factual predicate. For example, The Wall Street Journal produced the foundational reporting on how Kushner raised billions from foreign governments to fund Affinity Partners, including $2 billion from the Saudis. The Washington Post, meanwhile, broke the story on MBS lobbying Trump to initiate the war in Iran, but did not mention Kushner’s financial relationship with the Saudis — even though MBS controls the Saudi PIF.

Kushner is expected to return to Pakistan today for further talks with the Iranians. Will the news media continue to ignore or downplay his financial conflict?

https://popular.info/p/the-media-blackout-of-jared-kushners